The literary representability of the Shoah in the novel “Gec i majer” from David Albahari: Language between imagination and documentation

Abstract

This paper examines the role of the relationship between documentation and imagination as a mode of thematizing the inexpressibility (“unsayable”) of the Shoah in the novel Gec i Majer (1998) by the Serbo-Canadian author of Jewish origin David Albahari (*1948). As one of the first novels about the extermination of Jews in South-Eastern Europe written in 1990s, it focuses on Staro Sajmište, the former central concentration camp in the Western Balkans’ largest city, Belgrade. Incorporating theoretical theses about the witnesses (Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Georgio Agamben) and comparing them with the first-person narrator of the novel, this study demonstrates that difficulties of remembering are shown with the help of numerous stylistic elements and breaks in narrative structures. Thereby, the “gaps” in memory and the lack of knowledge about everyday life in the camp determine the literary representation of the Holocaust.